The present invention relates to rope shovels used in the mining and the construction industries.
In the mining field, and in other fields in which large volumes of materials must be collected and removed from a work site, it is typical to employ a power shovel including a large dipper for shoveling the materials from the work site. After filling the dipper with material, the shovel swings the dipper to the side to dump the material into a material handling unit, such as a dump truck or a local handling unit (e.g., crusher, sizer, or conveyor). Generally, the shovels used in the industry include hydraulic shovels and electric rope shovels. Conventional electric rope shovels typically include a dipper digging component rigidly connected to the dipper handle. This configuration allows the digging attachment to have only two degrees of freedom of movement in the dig path of the dipper: hoist and crowd.